I honestly would like to know which ORMs most critics have experience with. If it's something terrible like Hibernate, then no wonder. For reference, the ORM I've used the most is Entity Framework (the new one, rewritten for NET Core), and it's simply wonderful for 90%+ of my work, and doesn't get in the way for the rest of it.
I hated Doctrine. I like Django's ORM.
As for trivial boilerplate, I tend to find that trivial boilerplate no more troubling than any of the other compromises orms require, whether that’s polluting my data model with sql concerns or making me conform to db practices that aren’t correct for my needs.
And I’ve got extensive experience with orm going back a long time, including Entity Framework (which is a good orm that I’d still prefer not to use).
Every time I see SQL and Go stuff, I feel literally obligated to introduce people to sqlc. That said, sqlc only has good support for PostgreSQL, and you'd have to generate code for each dialect... so that's something worth considering. (I still find it to be one of my favorite SQL tools, even with its issues.)
In general, sqlc is very nice to use. It works well out of the box with a standard config. You can also override a lot of things.
One of the nice extras about sqlc is that it doesn't feel like a real dependency.
You don't actually include sqlc anywhere. You just use a config and the cli to generate Go code that relies on the std library. The generated code is very straight forward std Go code that you could write by hand.
A couple of reasons to use Go in a project would be great support for IO, stability, great tooling, low operational complexity and minimal dependencies. sqlc fits nicely in there.
